campaign. i had understood the president to be requesting we drop any investigation of flynn in connection with all of this. right. and then he is describing his contemporaneous thoughts at the time immediately after he had this conversation with the president and that s why i think it s so important, because he took these notes because he considered it so concerning and at the time he says that, you know, it was concerning given our role as an independent agency and that he didn t think the president was talking about the broader russia investigation but really just the investigation into mike flynn. but that s still an investigation. of course. of course. let s just keep this in perspective. there is a criminal investigation going on of one of the president s top associates, his former national security adviser, one of the most
then the president asked why there had been a congressional hearing about russia the previous week at which i had, as the department of justice directed, confirmed the investigation into possible coordination between russia and the trump campaign. i explained the demands from the leadership of both parties in congress for more information and that senator grassley had even held up the confirmation of the deputy attorney general, who we heard from this morning, until we briefed him on the investigation. i explained that we briefed the leadership of congress on which individuals we were investigating and that we had told those congressional leaders that we were not personally investigating president trump. i reminded him i had previously told him that. he repeatedly told me, quoting here, we need to get that fact out. in parenthesis. we did not have an open case on president trump for a number of
we see from this that it doesn t matter. we re finally going to be moving away from robotic responses and into the facts. i do think there is a huge difference, though, between the people who testified the gentleman who testified today who are working many of them are working and still have their jobs with the administration versus someone who has been fired by a man and i imagine these guys today were very aware of the tv cameras glaring on them and a certain someone watches a lot of tv. and they are not the ones in charge of the investigation. this is the fbi director. this is the guy whose job it is to be the head person in charge of this very investigation. yes. that the president is asking to just let go. that is why this is so incredibly monumental and shocking. we should just step back and remember and gloria has done a ton of reporting on this. the three things that we expect to hear when it relates to donald trump s conversations
let s see if there s fire. there is an investigation going on. the nate in s a bipartisan the approval rating is 34%. his base and the coalition of voters that got him elected. those are two different things. he got elected with 36% of t46% vote. they are now completely leaving him. so it was part of his electoral coalition but not necessarily the base of activist supporters and rallies and what have you. we know that 80% approval mark among republicans that mark was citing, historically, that s a bit of a danger sign in your own party if you re below 80. so why his core base supporters i agree, he is losing some of the electoral coalition that put him in the oval office. if you re saying that impeachment, i agree with you. going into something like that,
so sessions says i can t promise you i won t leave you alone with the president and in the passage that you just read, that he went to the acting deputy attorney general and said i want your guidance and didn t get any. you make a very good point here because one of the republican talking points since this story has come out is if this is so terrible, why didn t you go to sessions? why didn t he did. and he did. several times. the other point i want to quickly point out is the emphasis that he did not tell the agents working on the case because he s acting pre-emptively there in terms of not allowing the credibility of the rest of the investigation that s been going on to become accused of having political bias which, you know, i think we can see coming. he nipped that in the bud because the agents who have been investigating this all along have not been aware of this.